The digital divide in artificial intelligence adoption between the Global North and Global South is widening, Microsoft’s chief responsible AI officer told Euronews Next.
“We cannot let the digital divide become an even greater AI divide,” warned Natasha Crampton, who is also a former member of the UN’s High-Level Advisory Body on AI. Speaking on the sidelines of last week’s UN AI for Good Summit in Geneva, she set out a vision for closing that gap.
Calls for AI sovereignty have echoed across tech conferences in recent times, gaining fresh momentum after US export controls led Anthropic to restrict access to its most powerful AI models, Mythos and Fable, for a period last month. That restriction was subsequently lifted.
For Crampton, however, AI sovereignty is not simply about “local solutions in opposition to globally provided technologies.” Instead, she said, “It’s about making sure that local impact, local cultures, values, and norms are prioritised in these systems, while taking advantage of global technology where possible.”
Bridging the divide
To help close the gap, Crampton pointed to multilingual initiatives such as the Lingua project in Europe, which has since expanded into Africa in partnership with the Gates Foundation. LINGUA Africa is a joint effort between Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, Google.org and the Masakhane African Languages Hub.
The project aims to gather local-language data so foundational AI models can understand idiomatic phrasing and cultural nuance, ensuring communities have the autonomy and technical skills to shape their own AI-driven futures.
Crampton also stressed the importance of linking the private sector and government to build safer AI that reaches everyone. The UN held its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in early July, aiming to ensure governance reflects the priorities of all nations and that the benefits of AI are widely shared.
“One really important thing to bed down in the course of the next year is really the connective tissue between these different mechanisms,” she said, referring to the new UN mechanisms, the dialogue on AI and the panel. “Creating this connectivity between the different pieces of this infrastructure and understanding what everyone’s unique role is so that we can make faster progress that’s not sort of duplicative or redundant is, I think, one key objective for the year ahead.”
One example of that connectivity is the “digital emblem,” a partnership between Microsoft, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency. The emblem is intended to act as a legal shield protecting hospitals and aid workers from cyberattacks, as communication tools, logistics platforms, patient care systems and cloud and data centre infrastructure come under increasing threat.
Microsoft is calling on governments to back the emblem in policy, on humanitarian and medical organisations to help shape its implementation against operational realities, and on fellow technology companies to build it into the tools and workflows defenders already use.
‘Being a good neighbour’
Responding to growing public unease over the environmental and economic footprint of AI infrastructure, Crampton said Microsoft is moving towards a “community-first” approach.
“We want to be good neighbours. We want to be good members of the community when we’re building this infrastructure, and so we have been taking steps ahead of many other companies actually to offer a community-first set of commitments,” she said.
Rather than seeking traditional corporate tax breaks to build large data centres, she said Microsoft is working to expand local tax bases to help fund public services such as schools and infrastructure. She added that the company is carefully managing resource use to prevent its heavy computing demands from pushing up local household electricity rates or draining regional water supplies, drawing on advanced technology such as closed-loop cooling systems.
What is Europe getting right?
On Europe, Crampton pointed to the European AI Office’s work to connect with counterparts abroad, including AI safety and testing institutes in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. That kind of cross-border coordination, she said, is essential given how quickly the science of AI testing and evaluation is advancing.
She also urged humility from regulators everywhere, noting that rules written a few years ago on the best available information may need to adapt as the technology, and understanding of its risks, evolves. Reducing the lag between what society expects, where the technology stands, and where regulation actually sits, she said, should be a shared priority.
“I do think that type of international connectivity, which I do see the AI office really investing in, is a really important thing to do because while we are rapidly maturing, the state of the art on testing science, having that international signal and being prepared to sort of mature an approach, given new information, given new techniques, is really important,” she said.
“We need regulatory regimes to adapt alongside and with that change and ideally reduce the lag that we sometimes see between what society expects of regulators, where the technology is at and where the regulation is sitting,” she added.
